


Paradox

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:45:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16215548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: From an angst prompt: “Not with the person from the past in tow.”





	Paradox

It’s a paradox. That she’s more in love with him now than she has ever been. Than she should be. There’s a thesis there somewhere, she thinks, as she’s driving to the restaurant. Something about time dilation and velocity. How he has propelled her forward and held her back. How he has been both a burden and a blessed relief.

She parks and wonders if this is the right move. Or if it’s just an ill-considered attempt to recapture something from the past, like the X-Files. It’s not the same. It was never going to be the same. It should never be the same. Life’s journeys should look and feel different, even if they are taken on the same path. You’re supposed to learn. Learn something.

It’s a paradox. She knows so much about him, but he’s always a surprise. He’s holding a book in his hands, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It’s got a gaudy yellow bow tied around it. And under the ribbon is tucked a slip of paper.

“You are now a paid-up member of the Book League of Bethesda. Two years, no less.”

“You bought me a membership to a club I don’t want to belong to.” His arrogance is not even arrogance, it’s just the way he is. His is a special brand that has no apt descriptor. Though she does imagine the Germans would have a word for it.

He holds the door open as though his generosity counters his ego. It’s a paradox.

“You sound like Groucho Marx.” He is grinning. It softens her edges. Every damned time.

She slips past him and the Maitre’D leads the way. The book doesn’t fit on the beautifully-dressed table. She puts it on her lap.

“Their next reading book is Go Set a Watchman.” He is still grinning. She is still softening.

“Mulder, what sort of reading club leaps from an exploration of the structure of the universe to a novel of dubious provenance that is probably just an early draft of the magnum opus of the author?”

“I don’t know, Scully, but I bought you a copy of A Brief History of Time because the one you left at our house got ripped to pieces during the altercation with those Russians. It’s not on the Book League of Bethesda’s reading list.” He sips water. “Well, not for the next six months. See,” he says, stabbing the paper, “there are the coming titles.”

Our house. Ours. She orders sweet and sour salmon. He chooses grass-fed beef. As they wait, she watches the orange flame of the elegant crimson candle on the table, wave and snap. Wave and snap. Slow, fast. Slow, fast.

“Something plain, Scully. Sometimes life is so complicated that food should just be simple.” He’s back to grinning.

The wine leaves a purple film around the glass. It slides down the curved sides and she watches, fascinated by the pattern.

“Wine legs,” he says.

“I’ve only had one glass, Mulder.”

“Or wine fingers, or curtains or even church windows. It’s because the alcohol has a lower surface tension than water. Capillary action makes the liquid climb the sides of the glass and both the alcohol and the water evaporate.”

“But the alcohol evaporates faster,” she says. “I know, Mulder. But it’s still a wonder, isn’t it?”

He’s not grinning anymore. He’s serious and her stomach coils. “Do you ever think about twins, Scully?”

Her mind flashes back to the St Rachel Motel. She fucked Mulder. At the time, it felt so good and it just a bit a wrong. It felt so self-loving and just a bit selfish. Then the bizarre events of Mulder punching the daylights out of his other self and her giving her own doppelganger a pep talk about psychic manifestations and latent hostilities. The whole case had left her flying on a high and weighted down by guilt.

“I can’t say I do,” she tells him, swallowing the flame of shiraz and her lie. She was fire under his touch that night. That morning.

His foot is tapping the floor. “If twins are separated at birth what makes them seek out lives that are so similar, marry people with the same names, feel the pain of injuries of the other?”

“Sometimes they don’t, Mulder. There have been studies that show…”

His face sets. His foot stills. She stops talking. An image of him under her, face open for the reading, lips reddened by hers, hips bucking up so she was filled with him. She dips her chin to her chest and tries to suck in air without it seeming desperate.

“Are those two people themselves or are they individuals?”

“And here I was thinking you’d asked me out to wine and dine me.” She can still taste the salt-tang of his and her own arousal, coating her lips and her throat as she took him in her mouth. Joining.

“What if we have two selves and each grows at a different rate?”

“Two selves?” She sips more wine and snaps back to the now. “Is this a pop psychology quiz?”

“What if the person I was before is not the person I am now but I am still just one? Where does the other self go?”

“Isn’t that just experiential learning, Mulder? We all change as we go through life. You can’t separate what you’ve lived from where you are heading.”

“And what if your future is joined with another?” His hand slides across the table to take hers. His fingers are always softer than she expects. It’s a paradox, that for all his suffering and pain, Mulder’s touch is so gentle. “What if you want to shuck off your old self completely so that this other person can see the new version of you. The one that is better, more fully rendered; the one who is ready.”

His eyes close a moment, flicker shut like he’s waiting, defensive, for the blow. The arrogant self has disappeared, she thinks. He’s a paradox, this Mulder, this man she loves too much and not enough. How would she ask him to ever not be his confusing, bewildering, multi-faceted self.

“Then I would say that the future looks bright,” she says, drawing herself closer to him. Wax, transparent from heat, tipples down the side of the candle and the flame flickers. The wax settles at the base like petals. “For this other person. And your freshly-shucked self.”

“I think,” he says, “that you are ready, Scully. I know I’m ready. I think it’s time. Come back.”

She leans back, letting his words sink in. The bow catches her eye and she glances at the book, solid on the floor. “There’s a section in A Brief History of Time that discusses Feynman’s theory of sum over histories. Where each particle has many histories.” Come back. Come back. To go forward means to go back. It’s a paradox. She feels a sting of tears and shivers. “If we have many histories, does it not go that we have many futures too, Mulder?

He’s almost back to grinning. Framing the narrative of their relationship in the safe haven of supposition and theory. “And that we need to start down one path to see where it goes. But that any number of forces or influences or chance occurrences can disrupt that journey?”

She nods. “We’ve had a similar conversation before,” she says and thinks again about bodies joining, about curves and contours and planes and angles. “About fate, about destiny.” He remembers. She can see it in the slight dip of his forehead, the way his eyes darken a shade in the glow of the candlelight. “Hawking posits that there are arrows of time. The first is thermodynamic, where the overall disorderliness in the world increases over time, so despite our best efforts to create order, the energy used has created more disorder.”

“Sounds like my life, Scully,” he says, chuckling.

“But the second arrow is psychological, where our sense of time flows in one direction only – that’s why we only remember the past.”

“So, that’s your complicated way of saying that we can only go forward if we learn from the past?”

“It is, Mulder. Life in the past is complex, but the future is simple. Because we can’t see it yet.”

“We can go forward but not with the person from the past in tow?”

“I truly believe that we can go forward safe in the knowledge that wherever that person is, that other self, from the past, they stay behind us. They follow, but they’ll never overtake us.”

He is grinning again. Full on wide smile, teeth on show, dimples striped across his cheeks. “I like the thought of you always being on my tail, Scully. Whip in hand, ready to get me up to speed.”

She laughs then. “What would Freud make of us, Mulder?”

“I’m not sure I’m that ready, Scully.”

She walks up the stairs and checks out the covers of the books wedged against the banister. It’s only when she gets to the fourth step that she sees they are all the same – different covers, but the same novel. Moby Dick. The story of two men: one obsessed with the hunt, the other desperate to understand what to make of the prey and the predator.

“You know, Mulder. There are some theories that Moby Dick is much like physics. Ahab’s narrative is linear, his velocity is on a straight, immoveable line and Ishmael is a force of digression, a disturbance.”

“And yet it’s a book of everything that makes us human,” he says.

“It’s a paradox,” she whispers.

He snakes his arm around her waist and kisses her head. “Welcome home, Scully.”


End file.
